More on Languages

Since arriving in France I have eaten nearly every dinner with my host parents. As a result, I have plenty of face time and talking time with them. My host parents are an older couple who live in an apartment on a crowded street in the quarter of Angers. Their kids are grown and attending school in Paris and in other parts of France. They're very polite, they talk very calmly, and they strike me as in a grand parenting stage. They have had a number of international students before, and this is now, to some degree, how they occupy themselves (though my host mom does work part-time still). They do, however, enjoy occasionally poking fun at each other. When I pick up on this, what they are saying sounds really simple, in a way that almost makes it sound like contrived humor. My initial thought is that they are simply dumbing it down for me―that they are trying to be normal around be but still can't really be themselves because there's a new foreign person living in their house. If this were my parents and they had a French person staying with them, I imagine they would try to talk simpler for him or her. But in the last week or two I've begun to pick up on when my host mom is purposely rephrasing things to make them easier for me to understand. And yet, there are still these utterly simple things they say they aren't a part of that rephrasing. Are my host parents just simply drier with their humor? I can't imagine anybody having conversations with each other the way my host parents do without it being unnatural. Perhaps the natural flow of their conversations with each other are lost in translation―because it simply doesn't sound right in my head, in the way that I think. But every time I catch myself with this thought, it occurs to me: I'm not hearing English, I'm hearing French. Trying to mold what I'm hearing in French into an English way of thinking doesn't really work. Before I came hear, I unknowingly assumed that ideas are fundamentally unbounded and free by language. That's not to say that I thought that language don't influence the formation of ideas (and that different languages can express different ideas), but rather I imagined languages simply as different mechanisms for pinning down ideas which already existed. I can't say that there's a reason that I thought this, other than that language has always before seemed to me to be simply a tool for expressing ideas. Rather, it seems to me now that ideas don't exist without language. Put another way, ideas are created by language, and that different languages create different ideas. Sure, I can understand all the words when my host mom tells my host dad that if he doesn't stop eating so quickly he's going to become 'grand,' but I'm certainly not understanding the full idea that is being presented. Unfortunately, this view leaves little room for belief in ever becoming fluent in French or even understanding a single encounter, but I think that if nothing else it attests to how intricate and important languages are.